Last September, Tesla and SpaceX Chief Elon Musk provided $15 million to the Global Learning XPRIZE. The goal is to develop methods to teach the 250 million children who do not have access to primary or secondary education the means to teach themselves to read, write, and do math within 15 months. While programs exist to build schools and train teachers, they cannot scale fast enough to meet demand.

Illiteracy has long precluded individuals from joining local economies, but as our world increasingly becomes hyperconnected, this preclusion is greater than ever before. Consider an illiterate child in the developing world. A decade ago, illiteracy may have prevented them from running a farm in their local community. Today, ubiquitousconnectivity, digital commerce platforms, and innovations such as Estonia’se-Residency program means that an illiterate child will instead be locked out of opportunities at a global scale.

Elon Musk (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)

A Radical Solution

While technological progress may have made the problem of illiteracy more acute, it may also hold the solution. “The genius to solve these problems resides in the crowd,” says Matt Keller, Senior Director of the Global Learning XPRIZE. “And technology enables XPRIZE to reach the crowd.”

Founded by Peter Diamandis, XPRIZE is a nonprofit “innovation engine” that uses gamification, crowdsourcing, and incentive prize theory to provide incentives for competition and bring about radical breakthroughs that solve global grand challenges. After a number of successful competitions - most famously the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE that catalyzed the private space race - the Global Learning XPRIZE was launched in 2014.

The Global Learning XPRIZE challenges teams from around the world to develop open source and scalable software that enables children ages seven to ten in developing countries to learn basic reading, writing, and arithmetic without adult assistance within the aforementioned time constraint of 15 months. Hundreds of teams from over 40 countries registered to compete, and last year, five finalists were selected.

Expanded Testing

Recently, at an event at 3M’s Innovation Center in Washington DC, XPRIZE expanded the reach and scale of testing with the announcement of a new Impact Coalition. While the finalists are already testing in 150 villages in eastern Tanzania, field testing will be expanded to include various languages and diverse environments led by each Impact Coalition partner. The goal of the Impact Coalition, according to Global Learning XPRIZE Director of Strategy & Impact Emily Church, is to “collect and share globally-accessible data sets linked with our open source software for anyone, anywhere to learn from and build upon.”

The first Impact Coalition field test pilots include:

Queen Rania Foundation - The goal of this pilot is to explore potential use cases of mobile learning to support basic literacy and numeracy in Jordanian and Syrian Refugee contexts. The Queen Rania Foundation will investigate areas where education technology can have the most impact on children’s lives, whether in school, at home or at learning centers.

Education Cannot Wait (ECW) – As the first and only global fund solely focusing on education in emergencies, Education Cannot Wait has invested in 15 countries in crises. ECW recognizes the value of innovation in giving children and youth the opportunity to learn even in most dire circumstances. It is exploring partnerships to further these pilots as part of its support to countries such as Syria, Bangladesh and Uganda.

Teach the World Foundation - The Teach the World Foundation has already piloted a similar field test in Pakistan and Bangladesh over the last two years and will launch additional large-scale pilots in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa in 2018, with the aim to reach over 10,000 children, including Rohingya refugee children living in Bangladesh.

Imagine Worldwide - Working in two primary schools, this long-term pilot will leverage the software to provide hundreds of children in Malawi with the opportunity to learn to read and do math in their local language, Chichewa, for two or more school years in order to understand more about the impact of the technology. Imagine Worldwide is also planning a series of shorter-term pilots in Dzaleka refugee camp in Malawi to understand implementation in different contexts.

Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation (GAHI) - With XPRIZE and Queen Rania Foundation, GAHI and its partner Education Cannot Wait will develop a framework for assessing innovations in emergency education.

Diverse Approaches

XPRIZE believes that igniting rapid experimentation from a variety of diverse lenses is the most efficient and effective method to develop a solution, and the diversity of approaches was on full display at the Global Learning Impact Summit, which featured all five finalist teams together for the first and only time during the competition. Consider the unique differences between two of the finalists: CCI and RoboTutor.

Curriculum Concepts International (CCI) is a company of writers, editors, instructional designers, and technologists which has been developing educational and training programs for over 20 years. While CCI’s entry features a series of structured and sequential instructional programs, their unique differentiator is their development system. “Our key innovation is the ecosystem and process for developing products at scale, not the end product,” said Josh Powe, Solution Strategist for Team CCI. Known internally as Pubbly, the innovative authoring platform enables non-coders to develop engaging learning content in any language or subject area. By creating a system for interactive design and content production, CCI can scale the production of interactive learning content and rapidly localize the solution for use in multiple countries and languages.

At the other end of the spectrum is RoboTutor, which was developed by a team at artificial intelligence powerhouse Carnegie Mellon University. Led by Jack Mostow, Emeritus Research Professor of Robotics, Machine Learning, Language Technologies, and Human-Computer Interaction, RoboTutor builds on decades of research and is powered by advanced technologies such as speech and handwriting recognition, facial analysis, and machine learning. Their unique approach to data-driven design collects data from its interactions with children, which is used to both enable cognitive tutors to adapt to individual students, and to enable data mining tools to continuously evaluate and refine the design and functionality. “Our focus is at the intersection of AI and psychology, and our advantage is our ability to leverage CMU’s resources and expertise,” said Amy Ogan, assistant professor of human-computer interaction at CMU. In addition to Mostow and Ogan, the RoboTutor team consists of over 100 CMU students and faculty

Transformative Impact

The Global Learning XPRIZE will conclude in April 2019, and the team whose solution enables the greatest proficiency gains in reading, writing, and arithmetic will receive the Grand Prize of $10 million. That said, the impact of the competition will likely be felt long after it ends.

The idea is to design technology that brings out the self-learner, and thereby self-teacher, in every child. If XPRIZE can prove that children can teach themselves and each other, it would be a breakthrough in how the world thinks about learning.

“I see this as the end of the beginning,” says Keller. “Within the next decade, my hope is that children will have access to a device or platform that they can speak to, that knows what the child likes, and knows what the child does and does not know. It will be so entwined with that child’s life that it could become their mentor as they matriculate through school, just as a parent or teacher would. That is the future we hope happens because it is the only solution that scales to reach every child.”

Special thanks to Brandon Metzger for his assistance with this article.

I am the president of Metis Strategy, a business and IT strategy firm that I founded in 2001. I have advised many of the best chief information officers at multi-billion dollar corporations in the United States and abroad. I've written for the Wall Street Journal, CIO Magazi...